The Seven Deadly Sins Reconsidered

• Gluttony Will Out, Larry McAneny
• Sermon, The Seven Deadly Sins Reconsidered , the Rev. Liz Lerner

Gluttony Will Out

You can always proclaim that your wrath is just.
You can hide your envy and avarice both.
It's tantalizing to veil your lust....
A good rationale will cover up sloth.
Pride's pretentious in summer, before the fall,
But a glutton's sinning is plain to all.

Other sins never cause your clothes to fit badly.
(A lecher just imagines his trousers are tight.)
But a glutton's belt stretches and sags most sadly
And his lower extremities vanish from sight.
If you really love food, it's one of life's glitches
That your passion for nourishment shows in your britches.

Now your friends can excuse you and claim that it's glands,
A hormonal imbalance, bad luck with your genes,
But they can't help but notice you eat with both hands
And go back for seconds of bacon and beans.
When your chin is sticky and your shirt's unbottony,
Whatever they say, your friends know its gluttony.

God forgives a lithe and athletic sinner
Cloud Nine supports only those souls who are svelt.
St. Peter lets in all the folks who look thinner:
The Needle's Eye Gate requires a tight belt.
But those who must puff up the heavenly ladder,
In God's eyes, as in ours, are certainly badder.

© 2001, Larry McAneny

Sermon

The Seven Deadly Sins Reconsidered

Early last fall, I was at a gathering of some members of our church. Many of us were talking at a long table, and somehow the conversation turned, don't ask me how, to the seven deadly sins. We tried, collaboratively, to remember what all seven were but got stuck around five or six. Lust, we definitely remembered. Also Envy. And I think Gluttony. But we definitely missed one or two, maybe Pride. Or Wrath.

Since then, in what became preparation and inspiration for this sermon, the conversation has come up a few times, most notably in an email from UUCSS'er Jim Paoletti sent me following that conversation. In that email, whereby he forwarded information from his wife Jo, he gave me what has become, perhaps sadly, the most handy way I have so far heard to remember all seven - as characters from Gilligan's Island. Pride is represented by the Professor; Envy: Maryann; Wrath: the Skipper; Sloth: Mrs. Howell; Greed: Mr. Howell; Gluttony: the Skipper (again!); and Lust: Ginger. As Jim pointed out, this leaves out Gilligan, who, he concluded, must be SATAN! Yes, this is some of the lofty reflection your minister engages in with parishioners during the week.

But seriously, Jo Paoletti also found out that the seven deadly sins, as laid out in Dante's Purgatorio, had a surprising quality. They are all sins against love, for example, sloth is the indifference to love.

Now that was intriguing. Raised Unitarian Universalist, I had no formal education in the seven deadly sins, where they came from or how they are understood. Most of my sense of them came from Wilfrid Sheed's essay,which laid them out as secular complaints which were fundamentally sins ofexcess.

Think about it - none of them is bad in moderation. A modicum of pride is called self-respect, and is essential to getting through life as a fulfilled human being and not a doormat. A smidge of envy is what inspires us to get out and be someone, do something, when we see others with aspects of life we wish for ourselves. Wrath, well, isn't it right to be incensed as social injustices, at indifference to suffering, at those who make others suffer? Isn't that why we sing that hymn in our hymnal "We are a gentle, angry people?"

Sloth, well, sloth in moderation is just resting, and rest is important in busy, challenging lives. We spend an indolent morning or day or vacation, and come back energized for the work of life. And greed is harder to justify because the word is loaded, but like envy, greed can motivate us to do the things that will get us what we want. Do you want a new car? Better work for it. As long as it's work we do, rather than crime, to get us what we want. This leaves us with gluttony. Gluttony in reasonable form, just makes us wish to eat more than we need to. That's the central theme of holidays and many celebrations. The sharing of food even has holy implications in most cultures, and which of us hasn't seen something so delicious we just wanted to eat it all? And oh yes, lust. Our appetite to touch and be touched, that in its best form revivifies and excites the love that binds us to another. Some amount of lust keeps us young and is essential in romantic relationships that remain passionate and vital over time.

But the idea that these were not just sins we could understand in a secular context, or even just sins as laid out by the church at some point, but sins against love, was a new idea. The concept of sloth is more commonly understood as tied to reclining than to indifference to love. We speak of couch potatoes, armchair quarterbacks, not getting out of bed - we never speak of sloth as indifference, though indeed we could call it indifference to everything, indeed "the great zilch" as Wilfred Sheed puts it.

Wilfred Sheed goes on to point out that there is more to the seven deadly sins than their being "created by preachers to keep us from having fun; it was more likely invented by mankind to save its skin. In the old days, sin was defined as an offense against God and neighbor. Now, in tune with our changing interests, it would probably be called an offense against self. It is certainly all three....since providence has spread the sins fairly evenly we are obliged to work on smaller units: friends, families, selves."

Many of us do have a tendency to dismiss the seven deadly sins are some old-time, uptight dictum against human foibles - and indeed we do see for them, insofar as we look for them at all, within those we know, and, with guilt, within ourselves. But if they are sins defined not against proper living but against love, what does that mean?

Sin, in its earliest scriptural form, is laid out in the Hebrew Bible as human deviation from the expressed will and desire of God. There are over 50 words for "sin" in biblical Hebrew; it was a very big deal for the Israelite theologians. They perceived sin as something that could be either cultic or ethical or both. Sin could be in advertent, expressed in the verb "to miss" as in one 'missed' the right thing to do, the right way to be. Sin didn't have to be what one did, it could also be an act of omission, the ethical failure of one person to perform a duty or common courtesy for another. It could also be in the form of rebellion or revolt, transgression - the willful, knowledgeable violation of a norm, standard, alliance or covenant.

In all these definitions, sin as mistake, sin as omission, sin as transgression, in a world where there was no separation of church and state, sin was as much a matter of cultural norms, as of religious standards. Its more theological aspect come into play when the offense was against God, or when the failure, even unaware or inadvertent, was within the sphere of the cult. Sin against God was of the utmost seriousness, so punishment and compensation - expiatory sacrifices - were usually required. This connection between sin and expiation was reflected in the language. We joke in American culture about the powerful role of guilt in Jewish culture (tell story about the Jewish grandmother). But those connections are real, and in fact, ancient. In Biblical Hebrew the words for guilt, punishment and sin/guilt offering all share the same root. It sounds confusing, but its multiple, related meanings are understandable in texts like Genesis 4:13. God has terribly condemned and cursed Cain for killing his brother, and Cain replies, using the word that can mean guilt, punishment, or sin-guilt offering, translated here as punishment: "My punishment is greater than I can bear!"

There were as even more forms of sin, than there were words for it. Biblical prophets were constantly denouncing such wrong, especially crimes against people, which were judged as abominable and abhorrent to God: criminal violece, dishonesty, treachery, oppression and injustice. But just as there were many kinds of sin, so too was sin considered to be everywhere, and even inescapable. An ancient Akkadian text meant to appease an angry god reads: "Who is there who has not sinned against his god? Who that has kept the commandment for ever? All humans who exist are sinful."

A Mesopotamian prayer from the same era is more blunt: "I know not what taboo of my god I have violated; I know not how I have encroached upon the sanctity of my goddess...the crime I've committed, I know not. The sin I have sinned, I know not. The taboo I have violated, I know not. The sacrilege I have committed I know not... Humans are stupid, and know nothing. People whoever they might be, what do they know? Whether they've offended or done well, they know not at all. So.... do not reject your
servant.... "

A Sumerian wisdom text pleading for leniency from a god tells us pessimistically that : "Never has a sinless child been born to its mother....a sinless workman has not existed from of old."

Now Original Sin is different. For one thing, it's not a Jewish belief. Against the ancient Near Eastern belief in the universality of sin in all people, even the well-intentioned, the 'Fall' in Genesis 3 was explained by the Apostle Paul as uniquely important in early Christian thought. Paul believed that Adam's actions introduced sin and its consequence, death, into the world. Sin was understood to rupture the relationship between the creator and the creature, with the result that, if unforgiven or unredeemed, sin led to the death of the sinner. In the early Christian church, because sin was understood as alienation from God and the sacred ways of living, it followed both logically and historically the sinners became understood as people alienated from God and sacred ways of living. Although gospel accounts portray sinners as the recipients of Jesus' ministry, by the time of Paul's letters, a sinner was, among other things, an unbeliever.

It was the 4th century Greek monastic and theologian Evagrius, who first drew up a list of eight kinds of thoughts, passions he believed sprang from self love and troubled our spiritual development. They were thoughts of: gluttony, fornication, love of money, depression, anger, listlessness, vainglory and pride.

John Cassian, another church father who studied with Evagrius amplified on this thought, proposing the idea of the soul's development as one of moving from multiplicity to singleness, from complexity to simplicity, from chaotic motion to stillness. Here the troubling thoughts Evagrius listed were part of the environment of the beginning of the soul's, part of what must be struggled with in an ascent towards peaceful, untroubled spiritual oneness with the holy.

In the late 6th century, Pope Gregory the Great reduced the list to seven items, including vainglory with pride, depression with sadness, and adding envy. He ranked the sins based on the amount he believed they served self-love rather than love of what was truly precious: spiritual living and love of the divine. Pope Gregory led a life of self-imposed simplicity and poverty, and sponsored some of the most important advances in Christian theology. His beliefs were almost Buddhist: he saw life as a process of detachment from the world by desire for God. He believed that humanity's state was one of alienation from God, attached to earth as if by a weight, caught in a state of mutability and suffering that ended in death. Understanding this, he felt, led to humility and a realization that the divine is constantly found and lost within human beings, acting for their salvation. This realization itself would sharpen peoples' desire for spirituality in their lives, and lead to their salvation, progress toward unity with the divine. From most serious to least, his list ran: Pride, Envy, Anger, Sadness, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust.

Throughout the Middle Ages, Church hierarchy emphasized teaching all lay people the Deadly Sins and their counterparts, the Heavenly Virtues: Humility, Generosity, Meekness, Zeal, Poverty, Abstinence, and Chastity. After this, many writers, artists, theologians and philosophers used the idea of the seven deadly sins as fertile ground for further amplification. A specific punishment in hell was assigned for each sin. A different animal was associated with each sin. Even all the colors of the rainbow were each tied to a sin. In the seventeenth century, the Church replaced the vague sin of "sadness" with sloth. And we're not only talking about hundreds of years ago. Just a few years ago, there was an important, irreverent advertising contest to see which company could produce the best ad for each sin.

Over time many people have interpreted and expanded upon the idea of the seven deadly sins, the worst in the Catholic church's categories of sin. But in the midst of simple ideas like pigs representing gluttony, or red symbolizing anger, we have lost sight of the simplest, most essential idea about the seven sins - that they are against love, sins against spiritual aspiration, against divine living.

It's easy to write off the seven deadlies as simplistic, outdated, church propaganda. It's easy also to perceive some value to them on a secular level as a memo for healthy living. But looking at their history and evolution out of human experiences of longing, suffering, spirituality, disappointment, aspiration and love, restores their identity. Which of us has not struggled to contain and channel our anger, worried about whether we have enough or too much pride, contended with the shame of gluttony or the temptation of an powerful attraction to someone, worked to overcome our envy of another, felt the dead weight of torpor or depression, discovered in ourselves a desire for far more in this world than we really need or perhaps deserve? These are not outdated issues; they are not only for the prudish, they are not only for those far more conservative than us; they are not only for those far more spiritual than us.

Aren't these are our issues, yours and mine? We meet these challenges, and others, again and again in our lives. Deadly sin. It sounds at once strange and hackneyed. And it is strange and troubling in works like Dante's Divine Comedy where the sinful, even mere lovers, exist in strange, terrible circumstances in hell and purgatory, and suffer unimaginable torments. There are no deadly sins recognized by Unitarian Universalism. But we do recognize spiritual longing, and ethical concerns. And we recognize ways that pride, sloth, anger, envy and their ilk can be inimical to leading a life of spiritual and personal fulfillment, of feeling connected to the sacred in love. A couple of weeks ago I spoke of eating disorders as a spiritual matter, involving issues of pride, envy, gluttony and sadness. We may not resonate to the idea of these problems as deadly sins, we may not see them as expiated through acts of prescribed contrition or sacramental confession, we may not believe that for them we burn in hell. But we may well believe that fundamentally, consideration of issues as powerful forces with which we must, as humans, contend, reminds us to take them seriously. Such consideration calls and recalls us to a life of integrity and mindfulness, a life that is, ultimately, founded on love.

As liberals we live with zest. As people bound together by spiritual and ethical beliefs, we live with intentionality. May our appetite for life be healthful and careful, may our passion in life be healthful and joyful, may our anger be constructive, may our wants be moderate, may our life forces flow and be renewed, may our admiration of other inspire us to greater achievements, may our pride be deserved and shared. May we remain open to the many lessons and ideas life offers us. May we take what we can, and despise no one for their own, different journey. May we all know, in the end, the heaven all desire: of living unafraid, at one with the source of life, certain of love and peace.